An individual's health profile and healthcare history is often critical information that is required to provide the individual with competent medical advice, treatments, and care. As part of a complete health profile it is also often very important to have access to an individual's family health history in addition to the individual's own health profile and healthcare history. This is because many health conditions, and predispositions to health conditions, are genetic in nature and are therefore passed down from generation to generation. Consequently, an accurate family health history can help the individual and/or healthcare provider for the individual, take preventative actions, diagnose conditions and/or correlate symptoms with a given condition, recognize potential allergies and/or choose more effective treatments, and generally prescribe regimes, therapies, and/or procedures that are most likely to achieve positive results. In addition, an accurate family health history is valuable for determining lifestyle choices that may help the individual avoid, or mitigate a genetic predisposition to a condition and/or disease.
In addition, many third parties such as, but not limited to, schools, healthcare providers, private and government certification agencies, employers, and others, often request/require family health history information from an individual and request various forms be filled out providing this information.
In short, virtually any individual, and any healthcare providers for the individual, can benefit from access to the individual's family health history data/information. However, currently it is often very difficult for an individual or healthcare provider to gather, and maintain, accurate family healthcare history information. The situation has become even more problematic as people have become more mobile and family healthcare history information is scattered over multiple locations with multiple parties.
Currently, most family healthcare history data, if available at all, is obtained through family members via a healthcare version of the “oral tradition” whereby the information is passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. This form of obtaining family healthcare history data is flawed, at best, and potentially dangerously inaccurate and/or incomplete. This is because as family members age their memories fail, family contacts are lost, and family members die. In addition, some individuals, such as adopted children and adoptive parents, do not have access to even this common, if flawed, source of family healthcare history data.
Herein, an individual's, and/or family member's, health data includes, but is not limited to: data representing any family member's health issues, particularly those known to have a genetic or multi-generational element or an environmental element; data representing all, or part of, a family member's past medical treatments; data indicating any recommended programs and/or medications for a family member; data representing all, or part of, the family member's family medical history, i.e., the family member's known family medical history; all, or part of, any clinical data regarding existing disease, diagnoses, and/or treatment programs associated with a family member; all, or part of, any data representing trends/patterns in a family member's clinical medical history and/or lab results; and/or any other data that is indicative of the family member's general health, health risks, health history, conditions, allergies, and/or pre-dispositions to disease and/or injury.
In addition, even if a given individual can locate all of his or her family members and gather some family health history information, in the present “information age”, the average family member has significant amounts of health data/information generated each year. Consequently, over a period of several years, or a lifetime, the amount of family health history information can be overwhelming to both the individual and healthcare providers. This is particularly true if the family health history information is in printed or verbal form.
In many cases the family health history data must also be updated as family members age, conditions become known, and/or the family heath history information otherwise changes. This is often impossible, and even if possible, still usually means hours and hours of additional information gathering on the part of the individual and then hours and hours of data entry and/or organization by the individual, or another party. Consequently, currently, even if the some, or even all, family health history data is available, the individual often finds the process of obtaining the data too significant a burden and he or she simply abandons the project. In addition, even in instances where the individual puts in the required effort, family health history information obtained by an individual is again, all too often, reliant on memory, and/or comes from other somewhat dubious/unreliable sources.
Consequently, there is currently no relatively simple way for an individual to obtain, or share, family health history information and the problem of obtaining and maintaining accurate family health history information remains largely unsolved.